How Prudery Impacts Personal Health

There is a disconnect in the mind of anyone who endorses prudery between their awareness that they have a body and their willingness to accept the physicality or sensuality of their body (or the sensuality of others' bodies).  This disconnect can have serious spiritual and psychological consequences, but it is more accepted to discuss these in broad social contexts than it is to publicly acknowledge the ways prudery obstructs physical health, and the health of genitalia in particular.  After all, prudery easily breeds an ignorance of one's body.

The typical evangelical exemplifies this.  The unbiblical hostility towards the unclothed human body that is so thoroughly embedded in evangelicalism prevents people from understanding otherwise basic information about human anatomy and physiology.  Someone who shuns the body in general and refuses to become familiar with it is at inherent risk for misdiagnosing or ignoring bodily issues while they are relatively minor.  Rather than decry the human body (even complete nudity) in the name of Christianity, a rational Christian can understand that the Bible is thoroughly pro-body--and that the foundational Biblical teachings on the body would drive people to prioritize pleasure and health if they were absorbed by the church.

The naked human body is the pinnacle of God's physical creation, as it is the object that houses the human spirit.  The vastness of the cosmos has a lesser significance than the human body on the Christian worldview for this reason alone.  It is therefore fundamentally contrary to Christian theology to trivialize the body and its health, and yet prudery has accomplished exactly that: the typical Christian either trivializes the body or demonizes its sensuality.  It is sensuality, as well as sexuality, that frighten evangelicals, so it is hardly surprising when conservative prudery shackles Christians to ignorance about their bodies, as well as the functions and health of their bodies.

Since sexual health is a component of bodily health, Christians have no reason to disregard it or treat it as a shameful thing.  God intentionally created the human body with a capacity to receive and give sexual pleasure, after all.  A person is not more spiritual or moral because they view concern with the body as something petty.  The high status of the body according to Biblical theology is a basis for taking physical and sexual health seriously, not for pretending like sexual health is an improper thing to contemplate or discuss.

Refuting ideological arguments for prudery, as well as enjoying the human body, is not merely helpful because it enables a freer and deeper sense of pleasure based around the body, but it is also helpful because it frees people to more directly understand and care for their bodies and physical health.  It is rare for the average person to seek to understand that which they fear, and the human body as a whole is unfortunately regarded by a vocal proportion of Westerners as a dangerous thing.  Rejecting Western assumptions about the body is the key to shedding the sense of discomfort around familiarity with the human body.